Once the city's movie mecca, Los Angeles' Westwood Village looks to get some of its mojo back with the May 2 opening of the iPic eat-in luxury plex on Wilshire Blvd. But the Westside movie renaissance extends beyond just Bruin territory, with new and revamped multiplexes cropping up all the way to the beach.

When theater director Jon Vickers hopped on the phone with Variety, his single-screen cinema was in the middle of a typically diverse run. The night before, it had screened a brand new restoration of Luchino Visconti's "Sandra." That night, the program...

"Belle," directed by Amma Asante, opens on May 2 (Fox Searchlight).
WHY IT MATTERS: The film takes an original approach to 18th century slavery, making the troubling point that it was the foundation of a region's economic system -- yet the topic is...

For independent filmmakers, digital TV series may be the next green.
Like many directors, Paul Schrader acknowledges the difficulty of finding money for his projects. He had to fund last year's "The Canyons," starring Lindsay Lohan, on Kickstarter, a...

Forget "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Paul Stekler, Variety's 2014 Mentor of the Year, can, does and teaches. While chairing University of Texas at Austin's RTF (radio-television-film) department, the Emmy and Peabody winner continues to...

American Film Institute, Los Angeles
Graduate students in AFI's production-based program make 4-10 films in two years under the guidance of master filmmakers led by artistic director James L. Brooks. AFI alumni number 4,500, with an impressive 81% of them working in some capacity in the biz.
Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
The school, educating emerging artists for over 80 years, features private editing suites, Surround Sound recording and a 5,000-sq.-ft. stage with a cyclorama and green-screen...

Relativity School, an academic training offshoot of Relativity Media, is relatively well poised to enter an already-crowded field as a full service purveyor of media-oriented arts education.
Any new venture faces a struggle to get its moving parts in place.
Still, so bullish is the studio on the school's prospects that it has doubled down on its square-footage footprint at the 20-acre campus of L.A. Center Studios, where a successful 30-student workshop was run last summer.
"We are currently offering...

The ninth annual Intl. Youth Media Summit, founded by teachers Evelyn Seubert and James Gleason from Cleveland High School Media Academy in Reseda, Calif., and Aileen Marshall of Screen School in Scotland, brings together young filmmakers between the ages of 14 and 24 from around the world to empower their generation through media and action. Countries represented at the summit have included China, Sweden, Serbia and Iran.
"We knew that there was a great untapped potential in kids," Seubert says. "They...

Gold Standard Incorporated Photos

If our DVR queues are bursting, then why shouldn't Emmy categories be loaded too?
That would appear to be the guiding principle behind the television academy's recent decision to allow seven shows to be nominated in both the drama and comedy series categories, provided the sixth and seventh vote-getters are within 2% of each other's vote count. Given the number of worthy programs competing for a nomination slot, that razor-thin difference in votes would appear likely. What shows will benefit? Here's...

The Envelope, Los Angeles Times’ must-read awards and industry insider, turns its attention to the heavyweights vying for Primetime Emmy nominations, set to be announced July 10th,and the run-up to the August 25th ceremony. As TV delivers groundbreaking entertainment and binge-watching takes hold as America’s new favorite pastime, The Envelope shines a spotlight on television’s biggest names, favorite hit shows and who’s going for the gold.
“The Envelope provides the...

Emmy nominations were announced Thursday morning, and though there are plenty of reasons to be happy, just about everybody is going to have a gripe or three (no "Orphan Black," very little "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and "The Good Wife"?) -- because there's just a ridiculous amount of great TV worth honoring.
Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara and The Times' Gold Standard awards columnist Glenn Whipp will discuss the nominees and the not-so-fortunate, the omissions and the outrage in a live...